Kerri Smith Sleepless nights can increase your chances of forming false memories, according to researchers in Germany and Switzerland. But, as for so many aspects of life, it seems that coffee can save the day. Although neuroscientists know that memories can be strengthened while we are asleep, it's been unclear whether false memories form as we slumber or whether they are only consolidated when we are asked to recall the information the following morning. To find out, Susanne Diekelmann in Jan Born's lab at the University of Lübeck, Germany, and her colleagues asked volunteers to learn lists of words, each list relating to a particular topic. For example, they might learn the words 'white', 'dark', 'cat' and 'night' — all of which can be linked to the word 'black' — but black itself would not be part of the list. The researchers then tested their subjects' memories after a night's sleep or a night spent awake. They showed them the list of words again, having added a few extra words, and asked them to recall whether the words had been in the original list. The sleep-deprived group gave more false responses than the group allowed to sleep. "A lot of subjects said, 'yes, these false words were presented before', and they were absolutely sure about it," says Diekelmann. "Sometimes they were even more convinced than on the real words." © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 11821 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Meredith Wadman Some parents blame their children’s autism on mercury in vaccines.R. Faris/CorbisThe leading US government funder of autism research is drawing fire over its proposal to run a randomized clinical trial of a treatment widely viewed by experts to be useless and potentially harmful, but that is broadly used for autism. Chelation therapy, in which agents such as dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA) are used to bind metal ions in the blood so that they can be excreted easily, is an approved treatment for heavy-metal poisoning. Parents are using such therapy on children with autism because of their belief — which has been scientifically discredited — that mercury from vaccinations caused their children’s condition. In May, investigators at the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland, won approval from the US Food and Drug Administration to use DMSA in a trial of children with autism who are aged four to ten years and have detectable, but not toxic, levels of mercury or lead in their blood. The trial, ‘Mercury Chelation to Treat Autism’, is now under ethics review and has not enrolled any patients. Critics say the trial will put children at risk for what is certain to be no medical gain. The American Academy of Pediatrics has concluded that there is no justification for giving children DMSA in the absence of very high levels of heavy-metal exposure, notes epidemiologist Ellen Silbergeld of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “I don’t know why we have to do this experiment again on children.”

Keyword: Autism; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 11820 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Robin Nixon Contrary to the moans of many dieters, being hungry may make you happy. Or, at least, it can be a serious motivator whose evolutionary intent was to help you find dinner instead of becoming dinner. When our bodies notice we need more calories, levels of a hormone called ghrelin increase. Ghrelin is known to spur hunger, but new research suggests this may be a side effect of its primary job as a stress-buster. Researchers manipulated ghrelin levels in mice through a variety of methods, including prolonged calorie restriction, ghrelin injection and a genetic modification rendering the mice numb to ghrelin’s effect. Mice who had limited ghrelin activity seemed depressed. If pushed into deep water they made no effort to swim. When introduced to a maze, they clung to the entryway. And when placed with other mice, they tended to keep to themselves. (These behaviors were reversed when the mice were given a low-dose antidepressant commonly prescribed to humans.) In contrast, mice with high levels of ghrelin swam energetically in deep water, looking for escape. They eagerly explored new environments. And they were much more social. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Obesity; Emotions
Link ID: 11819 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nicotine-based drugs may help delay the moment a person with dementia has to enter a care home, say researchers. Nicotine has toxic effects, and carries a strong risk of addiction, but scientists have shown it can also boost learning, memory and attention. The effect is small, but it may help give dementia patients up to six extra months of independent living. A team at King's College London have demonstrated the positive effects of nicotine in experiments on rats. They showed that nicotine boosted the animals' ability to carry out a task accurately - particularly when they were also distracted. When able to give full concentration, the animals responded correctly to stimuli about 80% of the time. Nicotine boosted the accuracy rate by about 5%. However, when distracted, the animals' success rate fell to about 55%. In this case nicotine brought it back up to around the 85% level. The King's team, based at the Institute of Psychiatry, studied the mechanisms which underpin the effects produced by nicotine. They showed how proteins on the surface of cells respond to the compound, and pinned down the role of several key chemicals in the brain, including dopamine and noradrenaline. It transpired that there are only subtle biochemical differences in the way nicotine stimulates the brain, and triggers addiction. Key is the fact that nicotine stimulates flow of the hormone adrenaline in the body, which can produce both effects. (C)BBC

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11818 - Posted: 07.14.2008

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. If you caught your son burning ants with a magnifying glass, would it bother you less than if you found him torturing a mouse with a soldering iron? How about a snake? How about his sister? Such apparently unrelated questions arise in the aftermath of the vote of the environment committee of the Spanish Parliament last month to grant limited rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans. The committee would bind Spain to the principles of the Great Ape Project, which points to apes’ human qualities, including the ability to feel fear and happiness, create tools, use languages, remember the past and plan the future. The project’s directors, Peter Singer, the Princeton ethicist, and Paola Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher, regard apes as part of a “community of equals” with humans. If the bill passes — the news agency Reuters predicts it will — it would become illegal in Spain to kill apes except in self-defense. Torture, including in medical experiments, and arbitrary imprisonment, including for circuses or films, would be forbidden. The 300 apes in Spanish zoos would not be freed, but better conditions would be mandated. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 11817 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Sleep appears to strengthen connections between communicating nerve cells in the brain - a process thought to form the basis of learning and memory. Scientists in Switzerland studied a group of volunteers who were taught a new skill or shown images they would later have to remember. The skill tasks included trying to follow a moving dot on a computer screen using a joy stick. One group of participants was then allowed to sleep normally for eight hours, while others were deprived of sleep or only permitted a nap. The next day they were asked to repeat the tasks or recall the images while their brains were scanned using a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Those who had slept properly performed better, and this was reflected in their brain activity. Dr Sophie Schwartz, from the University of Geneva, who led the study, said: "Our results revealed that a period of sleep following a new experience can consolidate and improve subsequent effects of learning from the experience. "This improvement comes from changes in brain activity in specific regions that code for relevant features of the learned material." © Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2008

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 11816 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Brain ventricles that increase in size could be a sign of cognitive problems and the onset of Alzheimer's disease, say Canadian researchers. Researchers at the University of Western Ontario used magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brains of 504 people across North America who had enrolled in the Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative — at the onset of the study and six months later. They found that when ventricles enlarge, the surrounding brain tissue dies. The increase in size occurs during mild cognitive impairment and continues to do so as Alzheimer's sets in and progresses. Ventricles are one of a system of four communicating cavities within the brain and are filled with cerebrospinal fluid. The study also found that patients who had Alzheimer's at the beginning of the study had 60 per cent more rapid expansion of ventricles compared to people with mild cognitive impairment. "These findings mean that, in the future, by using magnetic resonance imaging [MRI] to measure changes in brain ventricle size, we may be able to provide earlier and more definitive diagnosis," said Robert Bartha, lead author of the study, in a release. "In addition, as new treatments for Alzheimer's are developed, the measurement of brain ventricle changes can also be used to quickly determine the effectiveness of the treatment." sticky coverings that form outside neurons, are usually discovered during an autopsy. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11815 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The study of anxiety is fast merging with the science of memory. No longer focused just on symptoms like social isolation and depressed mood, scientists are turning to the disorder’s neural roots, to how the brain records and consolidates in memory the frightening events that set off long-term anxiety. And they are finding that it may be possible to blunt the emotional impact of even the worst memories and fears. The war in Iraq has lent a new cultural urgency to this research. About one in eight of the troops returning from combat show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., which is characterized by intrusive thoughts, sleep loss and hyper-alertness following a horrifying experience. Many are so traumatized that they fail utterly to respond to antianxiety medications, talk therapy and other conventional treatments. P.T.S.D. is one of the most worrisome of the generally recognized anxiety disorders. There are four others: generalized anxiety disorder (G.A.D.), obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias and panic disorder. G.A.D. is the most common, but all are familiar complaints in doctors’ offices: more than 20 million Americans will suffer one of these during his or her lifetime. Genetics and the environment play roles in the development of anxiety disorders, but the point where these influences intersect is clearly the brain. The biology of anxiety has been very difficult to untangle in part because it is so familiar, so integral to our survival. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Emotions
Link ID: 11814 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By David Brown New research suggests that some cases of autism arise from defects in genes that can be turned on or off by mental activity, a finding that sheds light on the devastating condition and might eventually lead to strategies to treat it. The findings are drawn from gene scans of about 100 Middle Eastern families in which autism is unusually common. The disorder is marked by social isolation, speech problems and strange, repetitive activities. The study, done by a large international team and reported today in the journal Science, adds to the growing evidence that autism may result from problems in the immensely complicated process by which some networks of brain cells expand and many others die in the first few years after birth. The fact that three of the half-dozen genes identified in the new report are regulated by "neuronal activity" -- feeling, thinking, doing -- suggests in theory that changing the experiences of autistic children could change the course of the disease. "The genes implicated in our study are ones that interact with the environment and are involved in how the brain converts what it sees from the environment," said Christopher A. Walsh, a neurologist and chief of genetics at Children's Hospital in Boston who headed the team. "If we can activate those genes by other mechanisms, we might be able to help the kids." © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11813 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Emily V. Driscoll Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male. Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak. Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals. © 1996-2008 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11812 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Janet Raloff Not Yet ObsoleteSome animal-rights activists are taking a page out of the anti-abortionists' playbook and now bully animal researchers at home. iStockphoto An Associated Press story in the morning paper, today, described a move by animal activists to make attacks on researchers who work with animals increasingly personal. Teams that used to hold placards outside conferences and labs now picket scientists’ homes. Some “animal rights” groups use bullhorns to send neighbors the message that “Your neighbor kills animals,” the story said. These reports rile me up. On lots of levels. First, so-called animal-rights groups seek to compel change through brutish intimidation. They are, in a word, bullies. The goal here is not to change the minds of scientists about the value of their labors but to intimidate their families and annoy — if not enrage — their neighbors. (I don’t like neighbors’ dogs barking all day or night; bullhorn-bleating activists are just a human corollary.) If these activists have a beef with scientists, they ought to compel with data or the law. If those don’t work, maybe the argument they’ve been trumpeting isn’t all that compelling after all. Actually, I’d like to see someone probe the behaviors of these alleged animal guardians to see how well they practice what they preach. For instance, I strongly suspect that when the animal crusaders (and especially their loved ones) become ill or injured, they don’t eschew life-saving medicines and procedures that were first pioneered through animal research. And if they don’t, they’re hypocrites to picket, harass — and occasionally even destroy the research of — toxicologists and biomedical scientists. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 11811 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Tina Hesman Saey Two groups of researchers — one at MIT, the other at Harvard — have shown that astrocytes get the blood pumping to parts of the brain that are thinking hard. These cells may use blood flow and other tricks to rev up communication between neurons or slow it down, and may even play a role in storing information. The findings indicate that astrocytes are not just supporting actors for neurons; they deserve recognition as true costars. “Astrocytes are typically forgotten,” says Venkatesh Murthy, leader of the Harvard group, but they “are right in the thick of things.” Neurons have typically gotten the most attention from researchers because they are the brain cells that do all the thinking. But neurons cohabit the brain with a class of cells called glia, which means “glue” in Greek. Glia outnumber neurons in the human brain by a factor of 10 to one, and astrocytes are the most abundant type of glial cell. The view of astrocytes has changed slowly over the past decade. Astrocytes were once thought to do little more than hold the brain together and they were largely ignored. In recent years, though, scientists have learned that the star-shaped cells have a hand in guiding connections between neurons and controlling levels of chemical messengers in the brain. But those activities were viewed mainly as supporting roles. Now their central function in controlling blood flow indicates that astrocytes deserve higher billing. Without astrocytes, in fact, one of the most powerful tools of neuroscience — functional MRI — would not be possible. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2008

Keyword: Glia; Brain imaging
Link ID: 11810 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Nir Barzilai, a physician at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, studies longevity in people and animals. But longer life is not necessarily the ultimate objective of his research. Barzilai says he is more interested in how people can hold on to their health as they live longer. So in the search for healthy longevity, Barzilai studies the effects of abdominal or visceral fat on lifespan in rats. That's because mounting evidence shows that fat around the internal organs is worse for your health than other types of fat, as it is associated with health problems like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Barzilai and his colleagues at University of Alabama at Birmingham explored the effects of caloric restriction and the removal of abdominal fat in rats. They studied lifespan in three groups of rats: those that received an unlimited amount of food, those that were fed 40 percent less than the first group, and those that received the same amount of food as the first group, but had abdominal fat removal at five months of age. The rats then continued their respective diets and the researchers tracked how long they lived. © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 11809 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Steve Mitchell Peer pressure may push teens to start smoking, but their DNA keeps them hooked on the nicotine buzz into their adult years. So says a new study that finds that people with variations in particular genes are more likely to become addicted if they start smoking during early adolescence. The work may explain why some people find it harder to kick the habit and also underscores the importance of preventing children from smoking in the first place. Previous research has shown that people who start smoking during adolescence are more likely to be heavy smokers as adults; they also find it harder to quit than those who first begin lighting up later in life. Certain genes may influence whether people get hooked on cigarettes during their teen years, but nobody had pinpointed which ones. Three recent studies found that people with a single nucleotide base change in the genes that code for cell receptors that bind nicotine--the addictive chemical in cigarettes--were more likely to develop lung cancer (ScienceNOW, 2 April). Because the genes help produce nicotine's buzz, a team led by Robert Weiss, a geneticist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, wanted to determine if variations in their sequences influence whether people develop a stronger addiction to cigarettes. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11808 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Catherine Brahic "Robo-frog" has a way with the ladies. He has a speaker that broadcasts a realistic mating call and a shiny painted balloon that inflates and vibrates beneath his throat, perfectly mimicking the vocal sac of a real túngara frog. Researchers at the University of Texas are using robo-frog to study different components of communication between the frogs. And the Texas team has found good evidence that the striped vocal sac is important for wooing females, even though they mate in the dark. Túngara frogs live in the forests of northern Latin America. At night, males sing to attract females and their throats inflate. "The sacs evolved for males to shuttle air back and forth, so they don't have to suck in air each time they sing," says Michael Ryan of the University of Texas in Austin. Since the female frogs can see very well in the dark, Ryan and his colleague Ryan Taylor thought the distinctive pattern on the males' vocal sac might have another purpose as well. In experiments, females will move towards a speaker playing a recorded male mating call. But to test whether the vocal sac also played a role, the researchers created robo-frog – a resin replica of a male túngara frog with an inflatable latex vocal sac. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11807 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Many of the seemingly disparate mutations (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2007/tiny-spontaneous-gene-mutations-may-boost-autism-risk.shtml) recently discovered in autism (http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/autism-spectrum-disorders-pervasive-developmental-disorders/index.shtml) may share common underlying mechanisms, say researchers supported in part by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The mutations may disrupt specific genes that are vital to the developing brain, and which are turned on and off by experience-triggered neuronal activity. A research team led by Christopher Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., and Eric Morrow, M.D., Ph.D., of Harvard University, found two large sections missing on chromosomes in people with autism and traced them to likely inherited mutations in such genes regulated by neuronal activity. They report their findings in the July 11, 2008 issue of Science. The study breaks new ground for complex disorders like autism, taking advantage of a shortcut to genetic discovery by sampling families in which parents are cousins. The researchers found genes and mutations associated with autism in 88 families from the Middle East, Turkey and Pakistan in which cousins married and had children with the disorder. “The emerging picture of the genetics of autism is quite surprising. There appear to be many separate mutations involved, with each family having a different genetic cause,” explained NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “The one unifying observation from this new report is that all of the relevant mutations could disrupt the formation of vital neural connections during a critical period when experience is shaping the developing brain.”

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11806 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Alexis Madrigal Some birds, caged or not, only sing when they really need to, namely, during the breeding season. After it's over, their musical neurons die-off, and they are left tune-less. But now, scientists at the University of Washington have shown they can keep the birds singing, temporarily, by stopping the action of an enzyme key to their brains' natural cell-death processes. As cell-death mechanisms are similar across species, the research could open up new avenues of research on degenerative and age-related diseases like Alzheimer's. Programmed cell death, or apoptosis, is common in multicellular organisms and aids important biological processes, like maintaining homeostasis and acting as the chisel in skeletal development. While there are many reasons that a cell could sense it is supposed to die, the actual suicide process is generally the same: A group of enzymes called caspases execute on the order for cellular degeneration. What the researchers have shown in work to be published tomorrow in the Journal of Neuroscience is that inhibiting the caspases preserves neurons and brain-region function; in this case, singing. "In the future, physicians might be able to stabilize people who have suffered a stroke using these inhibitors," said Eliot Brenowitz, a University of Washington professor of psychology and zoology, in a release. © 2008 CondéNet, Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Apoptosis
Link ID: 11805 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Researchers in the U.S. have identified the emergence of a new type of brain-wasting disease that resembles Creutzfeld-Jakob, the human form of mad cow disease. Similarly to Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD), the human variant of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, the new disease causes the brains of sufferers to fill with tiny holes, robbing them of the ability to think, speak and move. In the U.S., it has been found in 16 people since 2002, 10 of whom have died of it. Cases of the disease were first described in the Annals of Neurology in 2006 and are discussed in an article in the June 20 issue of the journal and in a July 9 article in New Scientist. "I believe the disease has been around for many years, unnoticed," Pierluigi Gambetti, director of the U.S. National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, said in a news release Wednesday. It's believed that excessive amounts of prions, misfolded forms of a brain protein, lead to breakdown of brain tissue in both types of brain-wasting diseases. In the case of CJD, prions are not broken down by enzymes, but in the new disease, they are. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 11804 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By CARLA K. JOHNSON CHICAGO -- Pressured by desperate parents, government researchers are pushing to test an unproven treatment on autistic children, a move some scientists see as an unethical experiment in voodoo medicine. The treatment removes heavy metals from the body and is based on the fringe theory that mercury in vaccines triggers autism _ a theory never proved and rejected by mainstream science. Mercury hasn't been in childhood vaccines since 2001, except for certain flu shots. But many parents of autistic children are believers, and the head of the National Institute of Mental Health supports testing it on children provided the tests are safe. "So many moms have said, `It's saved my kids,'" institute director Dr. Thomas Insel said. For now, the proposed study, not widely known outside the community of autism research and advocacy groups, has been put on hold because of safety concerns, Insel told The Associated Press. The process, called chelation, is used to treat lead poisoning. Studies of adults have shown it to be ineffective unless there are high levels of metals in the blood. Any study in children would have to exclude those with high levels of lead or mercury, which would require treatment and preclude using a placebo. © 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 11802 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Clara Moskowitz Some songbirds can contract their vocal muscles with the fastest muscle movements yet described — about 100 times faster than humans can blink an eye, according to new research. The study found that two types of songbirds produce their tunes with superfast muscles, similar to those used by rattlesnakes, several fish and the ringdove (a type of pigeon). "We discovered that the European starling (found throughout Eurasia and North America) and the zebra finch (found in Australia and Indonesia) control their songs with the fastest-contracting muscle type yet described," said Coen Elemans, who conducted the study as a postdoctoral researcher in biology at the University of Utah. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Muscles
Link ID: 11801 - Posted: 06.24.2010